


Match

by viv_is_spooky



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, California, College, Coming of Age, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Existential Crisis, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Idealism, LA County, Mount Baldy, Mountains, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Short Story, Southern California, Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23446921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viv_is_spooky/pseuds/viv_is_spooky
Summary: For Callia, the mountains were a beautiful dream.  Baldy, jutting out above miles of swaying golden hill-grass, was the Olympus of her little southwestern corner of the world.  And perhaps she knew, in the back of her mind, that such a grand illusion could never match up to the imperfection of reality.
Relationships: Dresden Scott/Callia Turner
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Match

_"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,_

_just as things grow in fast movies,_

_I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."_

_\- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby_

Summer in the Pomona Valley meant many things – the change in grass on wavy hillsides from stunning green to pale, mellow gold, the slowing of life’s pace for the student population, and the onset of drowsy afternoon heat spells chief among them.

As the snow in the San Gabriel mountains began to melt, so too did the ice that had built up around Callia Turner’s spirit to keep her studies in check. Of course, this year Callia had opted not to take a break. A whirlwind of a young woman, she felt most at home in the center of a mess of projects or plans. 

While the winter had lasted, she had decreased the amount of mess in her life and increased the number of plans, putting aside her own personal projects until the fateful day spring grades were finalized. However, this intense amount of concentration had proven unsustainable, and now Callia wished she had not taken on the responsibility of an accelerated summer course. However, she was determined to persevere – never mind that she had bit off a little more than she could chew.

Thus, on the third floor of her college’s engineering building – a complicated maze of stairwells and deceptive broken clocks –, Callia spent one summer hour each weekday morning on an advanced math class she had long since forgotten the technical name of. For the majority of that time, she gazed out the window at the hills and mountains due east of her location, natural wonders seemingly close enough to touch. 

Each time she unlocked her car in preparation for the long drive home, she turned her key in the ignition and automatically blasted on the air conditioning. Then, for fifteen minutes or so, she sat listening to the hum of the radio and contemplating whether or not she should drive up to the close-but-otherworldly mountains that had become the focus of her pre-noon thoughts. Each day, the defiant remains of prudent restraint – which lay now mostly dormant in her heart – awoke to pull her imagination down from the clouds and fill it instead with practical worries.

For Callia, the mountains were a beautiful dream. Baldy, jutting out above miles of swaying golden hill-grass, was the Olympus of her little southwestern corner of the world. And perhaps she knew, in the back of her mind, that such a grand illusion could never match up to the imperfection of reality. Perhaps her reason for delaying her on-and-off plan to drive to the mountains had less to do with a war between practicality and adventurousness and more to do with a struggle between realism and idealism.

Needless to say, idealism won out eventually, and Callia made her way up to the mountains on pure impulse as soon as the final exam for her summer math class ended. What good was the end of the rigorous course she had just endured, she reasoned, without some sort of reward to follow? To placate her parents, who justifiably worried that she wasn’t ready to walk into this new terrain alone, Callia dragged an outwardly begrudging Dresden Scott (who secretly relished any opportunity to spend an afternoon at Callia’s side, and let her call him “Dres” when he would have glared at anyone else for daring to give him a nickname) with her. He sat in the passenger seat with a tired sort of restlessness, eyes half-closed while his fingers drummed near-constantly on the armrest between Callia and him. 

At first slightly annoyed by the tapping, Callia soon began to find its consistency strangely comforting, and by the time she and Dresden reached Lookout Point at dusk, her thrumming energy had been lulled into almost-stillness. 

However, as soon as she parked the car and kicked on the emergency break, Callia regained all of her former excess energy and leapt out of the vehicle. After stretching his arms and cracking his neck a couple times, Dresden followed her. As he exited the car, she stood looking ecstatically at the sun as it started to sink behind an unidentified mountain. A little nearer, he noticed that her eyes – still bright, but now troubled – had flickered to the city lights of the Inland Empire as it spread out below them. But as Dresden reached Callia at last, meeting her at a spot dangerously close to the dirt road’s precipice, her mood had morphed into an incomprehensible despair – the kind that produces no tears but leaves an unbearable ache in your core, the kind that makes you radiate loneliness like an airborne poison from every part of your body. 

Having breathed in this plague long enough to develop immunity to it, Dresden gingerly placed a hand on Callia’s shoulder and waited for her to flinch back into reality, to come down from the stormclouds in her mind. She didn’t. Instead, she gasped softly but mournfully, blinking her eyes as if she were trying to force tears out of her eyes – to force a currently impossible method of cleansing herself of pain. A cold wind blew in from the north, and she shuddered violently while biting her bottom lip in frustration until it began to drip blood onto the ground. 

“Callia,” Dresden mumbled, but Callia was not present with him in mind or soul – only in body, only in an empty shell whose substance had escaped through her mouth as a wail before streaming back into her eyes in a gust of frozen air. 

“I wanted to say it – to finally say it, and mean it – that I am happy, I am free, I am fulfilled…but I’m not. Even here, which has seemed the brightest and holiest of places to me for quite some time now. Here, her voice rose as she continued with a command to the sinking sun, or perhaps to the thin outline of a crescent moon that had begun to appear in the sky – “Light it up! Start the fire! Strike the match, dammit – strike a match to this restless soul of mine before its fuse turns to ash in my throat!”

After a pause, during which the wind rippled through her hair, Callia sighed, “I thought it would be here. Here, and today, that I’d finally feel happy. Truly happy, for once in my life.”

“Well, I suppose it may be a day, a month – or even perhaps longer – before that happens,” Dresden shrugged, softening his blunt words with a reassuring arm around Callia’s slumped shoulders. “Anyways, perhaps it’s best to know that your best day is still yet to come.”

“Best day?” Callia echoed. With a shake of her head, standing helplessly at the top of her world, she then came to the same bitter revelation that we all eventually do as functional adults: “Best day…Dres, I’m beginning to doubt there is such a thing.”


End file.
